MOre Harvard or Princeton alumnus got Fields Medal than Moscow State Alumnus.
First off, why do you care so much about the Fields Medal? Since when is the Fields Medal such an important trophy? The problem with the Fields Medal is that you can only win it if you are under 40 years old. The true equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Math is the Wolf Prize.
But Harvard has always been a powerhouse in science and outranks MIT there. Harvard has many more National Academy of Sciences members (roughly 170 to 100), more Nobel Prize winners, larger research grant income ($2 billion a year), many more top notch papers in leading journals such as Science and Nature (do a PubMed search for Nature and Science), higher citation indices, all spite of not being "as science/technology veered as MIT". According to the Shanghai ranking of world universities, which is purely based on objective criteria, not surveys, MIT received a score of 66 on publication in Nature and Science (Harvard being 100), 73 on Nobel-Prize winning alumni (Harvard 100), 80 on Nobel Prize winning faculty (Harvard 100), 67 on highly cited researchers (Harvard 100), and 62 on Science Citation Index (Harvard 100). The #1 university in science is Harvard, not MIT, despite MIT being "dedicated to science and technology". Only an idiot would say something like "MIT is superior to Harvard in Math and Science".
I can agree with this - for one very simple reason. Harvard has been around longer, and has had a longer history of preeminence in science. Harvard was founded in 1636. MIT was founded in 1865, and didn't become a prominent research school until WW2 (before that, it was just basically a trade school). So OF COURSE Harvard will have more citations and total Nobel winners, just by PURE LONGEVITY.
So, mdx49, what you are really saying here is that Harvard is an older school than MIT. Well, duh. We all know that. Just because a school is older does not make it better.
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First off, why do you care so much about the Fields Medal? Since when is the Fields Medal such an important trophy?
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Fields medal is the most prestigious and the highest level mathematics award.
I guess you are probably not a math major because you does not seem to know what it means to win a Fields medal....;.
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that Harvard is an older school than MIT
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Harvard is older but MIT has much bigger science/math program. and there are much more MIT science/math alumni out there... HOwever, Harvard science/math alumni outperfoms MIT science/math alumnus
Look at the recent winners of Nobel Physics Chem winners and look at the Fields medal winners...
Why do you think there is no MIT alumni who won fields medal even though about 35 people are getting MIT math PhD every year ? Only answer is the MIT math PhDs are not as good as Harvard, Caltech, Princeton math PhDs...
Fields medal is the most prestigious and the highest level mathematics award.
I guess you are probably not a math major because you does not seem to know what it means to win a Fields medal....;.
I'm not even a math major, but somehow I still know that the Field's is not completely analogous to the Nobel. It just isn't. Look at the descriptions of the prize. It is more of an award based on promise of future work. It doesn't matter that it is the only one the general public has heard of. You seem to be getting your info from Good Will Hunting, not reality.
Fields medal is the most prestigious and the highest level mathematics award.
I guess you are probably not a math major because you does not seem to know what it means to win a Fields medal....;.
Uh, no it is not, and I think you do not seem to know what the Fields Medal is. The Fields Medal is given to the best mathematician who is 40 or younger. But that's the key - why the age limit? Many would state that other math prizes like the Wolf Prize or the Crafoord Prize are more worthy prizes because they have no age limit.
Do your research before you post.
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Harvard is older but MIT has much bigger science/math program. and there are much more MIT science/math alumni out there...
No, there is not. Harvard is bigger in science/math. Harvard has Harvard Medical School which is a huge science institution. Harvard has the School of Public Health, and a wide variety of other science institutions that MIT lacks. Add it up, and Harvard has more overall science people than MIT does.
I agree that the Field's Medal is the highest accomplishment/honour for a mathematician. That's a fact. There are some other awards that can be compared with the Nobel Prize; however, the Field's Medal somehow stands out here.
But, you know, even getting a Nobel Prize doesn't mean you're automatically the best scientist in your field, and not getting a Nobel doesn't mean you're a crappy scientist.
Since Nobels are awarded for a single discovery rather than a career's worth of work, some people get Nobel prizes even if the rest of their ideas aren't all that great. Kary Mullis, for example, is the guy who discovered PCR. The modern molecular biology revolution probably wouldn't have been possible without PCR, but that doesn't mean that Mullis is a great scientist -- his single publication since PCR is on his belief that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. His whole Nobel speech is about all the different women he slept with on the way to discovering PCR.
Another example is the 2004 laureate in medicine, Linda Buck. She discovered the genes for the receptor family that allows olfaction. It was a great discovery, but the paper she published announcing the discovery was really sloppy -- all circular logic and inappropriate experiments. She was right, as later experiments showed, but it certainly wouldn't have been surprising if she had been wrong.
A Nobel Prize is a great honor, but it's not the best way to determine if someone is a great scientist or not.
The Fields Medal is often described as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics", referring to its prestige within the mathematics field. But this comparison is not entirely accurate because the Fields Medal is only awarded every four years, and its recipients cannot be over the age of 40. (To be precise, a recipient's 40th birthday must not occur before January 1 of the year in which the Fields Medals are awarded.) Also, the monetary award given to each medalist is much lower than the approximate US$1.3 million given to a Nobel laureate when the prize is not shared. Finally, Fields Medals have generally been awarded for a body of work, rather than for a particular result; instead of a direct citation there is a speech of congratulation.
This site doesn't recognize HTML, and even if it did, your posts would still look ugly becaue of your penchant for adding an extra slash at the end of your tags.
MIT graduate Jesse Douglas won the FIRST Fields Medal ever awarded (1936)
MIT Professor Daniel G. Quillen (faculty of MIT math department from 1965 to 1988) won the 1978 Fields Medal
MIT Post-doc student Curtis Tracy McMullen won the 1998 Fields Medal
These are the three that I know, there might be more.
Well if its really fields medal you are interested in, look at Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris. Nobody in the US cares about this French school, but its alumni got 10 fields medals.
That's more than any US university and only three less than ALL US universities combined. École Normale Supérieure - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
